The History of Unreal Technology - The Early Years

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By Andrew Burnes

Unreal Ops has launched the first part of an article that traces the roots of the Unreal technology and games:

A lot of people may not know that the Unreal Universe wasn't the brain-child of Epic Games as you know it (at that time they were known as Epic MegaGames). Even though today when you hear of anything Unreal today you think of Cliffy B, Mark Rein or Tim Sweeney. Rather the original concept idea came from a young programmer named James Schmalz. James had a very cool idea of making a terrain based game but was having some problems with bringing it to life. This led to one of the most important meetings in gaming history, he met with Tim Sweeney to talk about his ideas.

Where did the Unreal Engine start? Well some of the following information is directly from the two men themselves. A HUGE thanks goes out to both James and Tim for helping me out with the article. First up with have James Schmalz thoughts on those early days.

"My first memories..... Well, I was trying to make a terrain based game, so I was programming these cool terrain rendering routines. I must have tried 20 different algorithms to find the fastest one. At that stage everything was written in assembly language. Let me tell you that was a bitch. Then I decided we needed buildings so I jumped into some BSP work. I remember since I didn't have an editor at that point, I had to plot out all the points of the building in hand on graph paper with a pencil."